How Alaska Airlines uses technology to ensure its passengers have a seamless journey from ticket purchase to baggage pickup

From its humble beginnings as a regional airline to its current status as the fifth-largest carrier in the United States, Alaska Airlines has thrived because of an unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction, a corporate culture that encourages innovation and strategic partnerships in critical areas like sustainability.

For Alaska, its work doesn’t just begin at takeoff, nor does it end at arrival. The goal is to provide an end-to-end service for its guests that makes traveling as seamless as possible – from ticket purchase to baggage claim – using technology like Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Defender and GitHub to help along the way.

“We are constantly looking to see if we can apply new technologies or if there is a change in the process where technology works better,” says Vikram Baskaran, vice president of information technology services for Alaska Airlines. “Applying both of those principles has been key in our success as a leader in the aviation space.”

As cyber security threats grow and evolve, Microsoft Defender is a key asset in Alaska’s IT infrastructure, allowing the airline to continue to provide service for guests during attacks that cause global outages and ground thousands of flights.

Microsoft Source recently spoke with Baskaran about Alaska’s approach to using technology, how to remain resilient in the face of cyber threats and how the company sees its tech portfolio evolving over the next few years.

SOURCE: How has Alaska Airlines strengthened its IT infrastructure over the last few years?

BASKARAN: It all starts with our primary mission, which is creating an airline people love.
And when we think about technology investment, it’s based on that: How can we, as an airline, safely get guests from where they are, to where they need to go, offer them the best customer service and also be the most on-time airline? Our infrastructure essentially needs to be up 24/7 and we’ve been very deliberate about making sure all our technology investments support that.

We look at it in terms of two main platforms: Our own datacenters to support part of our critical workloads and the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform to support the other part of the workload. We started about 10 years ago with Azure and we’ve been strategically moving workloads from our datacenters to Azure. We invest in both platforms and make sure we have strong partners like Microsoft who can stand behind the technology platforms we pick.

SOURCE: Resiliency is key in the aftermath of a tech issue – how does Alaska position itself to bounce back and to restrengthen critical areas if an event occurs?

BASKARAN: A lot of this starts with the planning process. We make sure the core group – the dispatchers, systems operations control, the pilots, airports – have processes that are architected for resiliency. We work with partners like Microsoft to say, ‘We are leveraging the Azure Cloud, and let’s architect the solution right.’ We had Microsoft Azure architects who were part of our team as we built it out.    

We are constantly in touch with partners like Microsoft to receive input to strengthen the resilience of the product through the entire journey. By the time it is out there to be tested, a lot of the resiliency is already built into the technology. Then, when events do happen, we are prepared for that. We have a strong playbook on how to quickly restore service.

Hope is not a strategy. Airlines are extremely complex operations, and we must be deliberate in the order in which we address our systems. We have response plans that look at the underlying architecture so we can quickly determine when we can restart certain processes or when we should leverage our disaster recovery plans. We also look at the reactive side to ensure there’s a good counter to the proactive side.  Between those, we can ensure we are a resilient airline overall.

SOURCE: How have Alaska’s employees become empowered to solve technology issues or suggest solutions?

BASKARAN: We look for people with a learning mindset and for people who speak up. So when we are responding to a critical incident, there’s no rank or hierarchy. When these issues happen, you could be a new engineer who joined the team last week. You’re still heard the same way as an engineer who’s been on our team for 20 years.

We constantly encourage our teams to look at how do we solve the problem. We look for the disparate voices and all the angles to make sure the solution we put out there is a robust one.

SOURCE: Alaska and Microsoft are both Seattle-based companies. How have you seen the partnership between the companies grow during your time?

BASKARAN: The Alaska and Microsoft partnership is a long, deep one that has lasted over 20 years. The relationship is based on transparency, trust and holding each other accountable. There are three key areas that we have grown our partnership: Azure, Defender and GitHub.

Starting in 2014, we made a very deliberate bet. Azure was an up-and-coming cloud platform and we conducted a detailed analysis and said, ‘We’ve selected Azure to be our primary cloud partner.’ Ten years later, I can say that was probably one of the best decisions we have made, because we continue to grow and build on it. In fact, when you look at our frontline tools for our pilots, flight attendants, airport agents and ramp agents, all have been natively built on Azure.

Then in 2020, we were evaluating our long-term cybersecurity product suite. The Defender product did not have all of the capabilities that Alaska needed, but based on our deep relationship with Microsoft, I picked it. Four years later, it has grown and it is one of the world-class cybersecurity tools we have deployed. It is in our entire technology ecosystem.

The third part of it is when we looked at our software engineering lifecycle, we started leveraging GitHub. Over the last 18 months or so when GitHub Copilot for Business was launched, we jumped in very early. About half of our software engineering team uses it, with plans to expand.

SOURCE: Looking ahead, where does Alaska see areas for improvement or further investment in its technology suite?

BASKARAN: In the world of cybersecurity, threats are changing every hour of every day. We partner closely with Microsoft to ensure we can successfully protect Alaska’s digital assets. We are looking to be ahead of these threats every day.  

With generative AI, we were one of the early ones (to adopt it). In April of last year, we started leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and we’ve made some really good strides. Some of the business teams, including customer care and contact centers, started to leverage it and we are looking for further enhancements so we can unlock a lot more business value.

Top photo: An Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-900ER photographed in April 2016 by Chad Slattery. (All photos courtesy of Alaska Airlines)